Alphaville and NCT

In today’s tutorial we have added some friends to our blogs. So now we can all post comments on each others blogs and see everyone’s different opinions on what we have learnt.

Yesterday in our lecture we watched Alphaville (1965) by Jean Luc Goddard. It was a French new wave film set in black and white with English subtitles. The movie was set in the future.

Gene Volovich from Internet Movie Database website explained the storyline as “Lemmy Caution, an American private-eye, arrives in Alphaville, a futuristic city on another planet. His very American character is at odds with the city's ruler, an evil scientist named Von Braun, who has outlawed love and self-expression.”

In the film there were no special effects just locations of Paris that looked futuristic as they didn’t have the resources available in 1965 as they do now in films. We discussed in class the reaction to Alphaville in 1965 compared to now in 2008. Back then computers didn’t exist and the thought of a computer taking over the world was unthinkable. Our science fiction movies now revolve around the galaxy and space travel such as Star Wars.

Alphaville was set in the genre of French new wave. French new wave was an artistic movement which became popular in the late 1950’s till the mid 1960’s. It allowed directors to film at locations rather than in a studio, have more improvised scripts and natural sets and lighting.

New communication technologies have made a huge impact on everyday life things such as the internet, mobile phones and email. I began to use these I guess at the start of high school as I needed the internet for research and also to talk to my friends over msn and hotmail. Nowadays I still use it for research but I use MySpace instead of msn as you can have a range of different friends even people you have never met in person. Privacy can be an issue sometimes with all these new ways of communicating but there is always ways of setting your personal information to private that only you and your friends can see. But the internet can be pretty dodgy and nothing can ever really offer security.